Manfred Werder and Kevin Corcoran’s artistic practices engage with the potentials of working on site. They are now collaborating on a project which aims at rendering visible certain historic strata of the Bay Area. Searching for and encountering places and traces through various strategies of collecting and recording, they actualize their musical practice on site.

Through text, image, and location recordings, certain sites in tension between historical and current contexts — often obscured by urban interventions — are understood as places in process, sites of durational emergence.

History is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance. What science has “determined”, remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete.

–Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [N8,1]

[T]he term coexistence is perhaps inadequate: stress needs to be laid also on conformation, and on the inevitability of conflict. What is at issue is the constant and conflictual process of the constitution of the social, both human and nonhuman. Such a view does not eliminate an impetus to forward movement, but it does enrich it with a recognition that movement be itself produced through attention to configurations; it is out of them that new heterogeneities, and new configurations, will be conjured. This is a temporality which is not linear, nor singular, nor pregiven; but it is integral to the spatial.

–Doreen Massey, For Space [13, 147-148]

Whatever is destroyed should enter, in order to be meaningful, other emerging entities.

–Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais [54]

Manfred Werder, Ciudad de México

Composer and performer, is wandering through the abundance in which he traces all possible enunciation regarding the world. His recent work [ the music of history ] intensifies the practice of inscription, of found materials through typewriters and the public space through dérive. Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4000 page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997. Lives in situ.

Kevin Corcoran, San Francisco

Works with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of music, art, communication and place while understanding the field recording to be actualized through sound, image, text and object.

This event was funded in part by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.